The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

head on his lap. Before bedtime, they’d taken to the habit of retreating here, each with a book, reading for at least thirty minutes. It was their time to decompress, air out the day, be together silently. It had become Colin’s favorite time.

Until his mother called. And she always called.

“Okay.” He sighed, then thumbed the phone to the voicemail app. One new message. Fourteen seconds. He pressed Play and held the phone to his ear, not wanting Meg to hear. He wasn’t hiding anything from his wife, but he knew how agitated Meg became when his mom set to drinking. Jackie Pearson was a lovely person until the evening, at which time she turned into someone else entirely. Sometimes Colin wondered if it was the other way around, and his mom’s real acting chops were on display during daylight hours.

“You probably don’t remember Linda Grassey,” the scratchy voice on the phone said. “But she was a real slut. They lived just down the street, and she always flirted with your father. Fawned about him like a goddamn saloon whore, getting him to help her out whenever she could. Oh, you’re such a good neighbor. And so strong! Bitch died twelve years ago.”

Saloon whore?

His mom’s foul-mouthed missives were a beacon, summoning Colin to come rescue her from her own mind.

She’d been on a steady decline since Colin’s father died two years earlier. Her doctor labeled it anxiety, prescribing meds she refused to take, just as she refused so many other things. Refused to move out of the family home and into an assisted-living facility. Refused to stop driving until the state wouldn’t renew her license. Refused to stop drinking, even though it was probably the thing that’d end up killing her. She was only seventy-five but whatever life remained was eating her from the inside out.

Colin and Meg had been happy in Madison, but he knew he needed to return to the town he grew up in and look after his mom, because no one else was going to. He had no siblings, no father, no relatives anywhere near Wisconsin.

Meg agreed, though Colin knew the move from Madison to Milwaukee wasn’t what she wanted. By the time they’d settled into their rental home in Whitefish Bay four months ago, Meg was unexpectedly pregnant. Though they’d been trying, they’d put a pause on their plans until they had a better idea of how long they’d be in Whitefish Bay. But there was that one night they hadn’t been so careful, and now Meg, at thirty-five and on the cusp of being a first-time mother, was without her Madison friends and community.

Colin hoped they could go back home in the not-too-distant future, but that, of course, would require his mother dying.

“What’d she say?” Meg asked.

“Something about a woman named Linda.”

“You going over there?”

“Suppose I need to.”

She sighed.

“Don’t stay late.”

He never did. He just made sure his mother got into bed, just as she had done for him four decades ago when he’d been the one unable to figure out the world.

Colin and Meg had rented a house only four blocks from the one he grew up in, and the walk took him less than ten minutes. It was odd being back, smelling the same summer-night air, passing the same houses he did when he walked to school as a boy. With the observational skills he’d honed as a cop, he noted the subtle changes in the old, familiar houses: new paint schemes, reconfigured landscapes, popped-out roofs accommodating new additions. But it wasn’t the little changes he noticed most. Rather, it was a sense that Whitefish Bay seemed a little smaller, more frayed, and less special than Colin remembered. There was a lesson in that, he thought. Maybe the key to living was being continuously on the move, experiencing new things, so the ache of time was never acute; memories and melancholy were inextricably mixed.

One thing he knew for certain. No way in hell was he going to end up like his mom. Trapped in a house, trapped in a mind, and unwilling to attempt escape from either.

Colin walked up the path to his old house and tried the door. Locked. He took out his keys and let himself in.

“Mom?”

“Upstairs.”

He exhaled, ever-so-slightly disappointed in hearing her voice. A small part of him (though larger than he’d ever confess to) was anticipating the moment no voice called back. That he’d arrive to find she’d passed on, her heart or liver having finally given out.

It was a morbid thought, but one he had nonetheless.

Colin walked around a waist-high stack of newspapers and headed to the stairs, shaking his head at how much of his old house was now brimming with piles of worthless things. The worst part of his mom’s descent into her dark twilight was the hoarding. It had started years ago, but until his father died, it was more like heavy clutter than anything more serious. But in the last year, the piles grew, as if she was trying to leave layers of her life’s sediment behind to be studied by future generations.

Colin’s mind churned the same thought, over and over, as he navigated the crowded stairs to his mother’s bedroom.

It’s all just such a goddamned shame.

Four

Bury, New Hampshire

People assume I’m of Irish descent because of my green eyes, reddish-brown hair, and skin that will burn if I as much as look at a postcard of the beach. I’m an anomaly; the rest of my family appears as WASPy as the Yates family name implies. We are a small, Protestant family destined to keep our numbers low and our wealth growing.

I’m thankful to be the black sheep.

My mother is dead, a victim of a pulmonary embolism when I was only three. I hardly remember her, but in every photo I have, I see Grace Kelly. Elegant even in her most casual of poses. Lithe, willowy. She was a model, and I have a handful of magazine ads to prove it.

My father never remarried.